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The Birth Of @arttrail

I created the @arttrail account a few days ago.

I want to use this account to start upvoting on the great, original art I find throughout steemit.
Since I started curating for the #art-trail section of #steemtrail a few weeks ago, I find that there are a few of my posts I have put forward for a steemtrail vote that did not succeed in getting upvoted. This is not really a problem. Obviously, with all the posts steemtrail receives from all of its trail sections, they all won’t receive an upvote. But, with @arttrail now active, I can vote for posts that meet certain criteria for an #art-trail upvote, but not necessarily for a steemtrail vote.

Follow ArtTrail On Streemian

If you’re an artist already following @steemtrail on streemian, consider following @arttrail as well.

I plan on upvoting no more than 5 times a day with @arttrail. So, if you can spare the extra votes it will really benefit each artist’s post that is upvoted. @arttrail is following @steemtrail on streemian, so anything they upvote will get the votes from everyone. But if SteemTrail doesn’t vote, the artist will still get the votes from the ArtTrail.

@steemtrail has a detailed description you can check out to follow a trail on streemian, get setup with discord, and open up an OpenLedger account to receive your TrailCoin.

My Criteria For An ArtTrail Upvote

I’ve been trying to stick to a few general guidelines when deciding if I should pass a post along for a SteemTrail vote.

Original Artwork

This could be any type of art, but it has to be original. I’ve noticed people putting posts about other people’s art on discord. Although some of the art is really good, it’s not original to the author of the post and doesn’t really qualify (in my eyes) for an upvote.

No Other Trail

Art is a very vague topic. Almost anything could be art, but there are other trails where art falls under as well. I try not to upvote music, photography, or comics. Those are certainly considered art, but there are #music-trail, #photography-trail, and #comic-trail to cover those. I’m looking things that aren’t covered in other trails like painting, drawing, sculptures, graffiti, sketches, etc.

Informative Post

This could be anything that fills up your post and makes it interesting and unique. If someone does a painting and posts it on steemit with only one image and no text, unless their painting is incredibly good, I’m probably going to move on. I’m looking for the post to be thought out a little bit. There are plenty of great posts on steemit that take it to the extra level. Show multiple pictures of your progression along the way, describe the techniques you used to make the drawing, or tell a story about your sculpture and why you chose to do it. Just that little something extra can make the post that much more interesting.

ArtTrail Posts

Bi-weekly Promotion

I’m thinking, once the seven-day payouts start, anything @arttrail upvotes will be put into a bi-weekly post further promoting the artists from the previous few days. As well, I will try and include all the posts included in the previous one who went on to received an upvote from SteemTrail.

This will be more beneficial, I think, once the next hard fork on steemit is implemented and payouts are extended to seven days instead of 24 hours.

Until the hard fork occurs, @arttrail will re-steem all posts that are upvoted to help with artist promotion.

Contests

Once I work out a good system for doing things, I’ll come up with some ArtTrail Contests to try and get people’s creative side flowing. There are already a number of people running great artistic contests on steemit and everybody seems to really enjoy them so the more the merrier I say.

Trail Coins

I have seen a few posts asking whether or not this is worth anything. As of yesterday, I can say that Trail is worth something. I have successfully transferred all my Trail I received from curating over the last few weeks and sent them to Poloniex as Bitcoin. I was actually surprised to find out that all the Trail I received was worth 0.00999609 BTC (about $10). I’ll make a post about how it’s done a little later because it was a little confusing to figure out the first time.